“What I am going to reveal is my own personal experience, a valuable window on history” Mo Yan, the acclaimed Chinese writer, announces in this ambitious novel. And what a history he tells, through the eyes of a wealthy landlord executed in 1948, during the Land Reform Movement. In successive incarnations, he returns to his village as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey, and finally as a big-headed boy. Here is the inside story, from human and animal perspectives, of a society buffeted between the turbulent winds of ideology, told with brio, pathos, and a lot of humor.